


Ouroboros

by GloryBox



Category: Better Call Saul (TV)
Genre: Angst, Dissociation, Gen, Gunshot Wounds, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-18
Updated: 2020-11-18
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:21:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,197
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27613388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GloryBox/pseuds/GloryBox
Summary: The earth is warm and soaked in blood.
Comments: 7
Kudos: 14





	Ouroboros

**Author's Note:**

> This is more or less just a recounting of the events of "something beautiful" but with a more in depth look into what was going through nacho's poor little head the whole time.  
> Anyways, here's my first fic in 3 years.

The earth is warm and soaked in blood. Nacho looks unseeingly to the sky, thinking that there should be vultures by now, if not for him, then for Arturo, rotting in the driver's seat of his car, his defrosted brains splattered across the windshield. 

_Gotta make it look real._ What a fucking prick. 

He doesn’t know what will kill him first anymore, bleeding out or heat stroke. Maybe dehydration. It hurts to blink, his eyelids so dry they drag and scratch his corneas.

He fades. 

He circulates between the white hot pain in his abdomen, thinking about the lies he has to say in the event Marco and Leonel save him, and what he’ll say if they don’t. There’s a possibility they might just mercy kill him, thinking he might be just too far gone to save within the means of the cartel.

He thinks if they give him a last request, he’d have them wire his money to his father anonymously. His father will know it's from him, but if they keep it low enough, he might accept it. Maybe 60,000 or 100,000, nothing crazy, just something to make sure he stays comfortable for the rest of his days. But then Nacho thinks this would send his father out to look for him, to confront him, and he’d end up having to find out his only son was dead and buried in some unmarked hole in the desert by an unbothered Salamanca. Maybe the best gift would be nothing at all. 

He knows he’s in the home stretch when he starts to feel cold, despite the sun beating down on his face. He hasn’t been holding pressure to the abdomen wound for some time now, he lost the strength to do so early on and he thinks about all his blood soaking the sand underneath him. His last mark on the earth. 

He gets to the point where all his thoughts are muted, he's only in tune with the pulsating pain of his wounds and the relentless waves of heat beating down from the sun. Each breath causes a lazy, diffusing pain from the hole near his hip, the bullet in his shoulder a beating, relentless ache. They pulse in tandem with each other and he desperately tries to find a place in his head to hide from the pain, from the heat, from the life he fucked up so entirely that he was now going to die for the authenticity of a fake shoot out.

He knows it's punishment from Fring, for what he did to Hector, but he thinks if there is such thing as divine punishment, it's for what he did to his father. He thinks of the broken way his father accepted Salamanca money, unable to look at him. Broken and disgusted. Nacho thinks this had been a long time coming, for what kind of son debased his own father, exploiting his father's love to coerce him into accepting cartel money. 

A few times a blessedly cool breeze brushes against the hot skin of his face and he almost wants to weep at the brief and minuscule amount of relief it brings him. 

He doesn’t hear the slam of car doors, or foot steps, or the crunch of gravel or broken glass under boots. Instead, two figures appear in his periphery, and he rolls his head to look, knowing full well it was Marco and Leonel. 

After hauling him into the back of their sedan, ripping open the blood and sweat soaked shirt and inspecting the gut wound, Marco asks him _Who did this?_ Nacho has to brace himself to speak, pull himself out of the dazed fog he’d fallen in. After all, he had a job to do. _Don’t know, drove a silver car. A firebird maybe?_

Marco seems content with that answer and rewards him by pouring 91% Isopropyl alcohol directly onto his gut wound. Nacho hardly holds back the pained yell, the sudden burn of the alcohol almost as jarring and violent as the initial gunshot itself. His vision clouds white, hardly aware of the vehicle as it begins to move, speeding away from a burning car. 

...  
  


He’s not even aware they had come to a stop until light shines in as the back door is opened and an unfamiliar voice cuts through the fog of his brain. 

_Jesus - not here. Let me grab my bag and tell my staff...Jesus._

He comes to when they are moving again, the unfocused face of Marco watching him, unwavering and expressionless. Next to him is some white guy in tan scrubs, likely a doctor or vet, probably a vet, trying to fill a syringe but is being jostled around. He yells about the potholes and as Nacho wonders _Does he know who he’s yelling too?_ The vet plunges the syringe into the meat of his shoulder.

A brief panic flares through Nacho - what the hell did he just inject him with? He doesn’t contemplate for long though, the drug, whatever it is, drags him blissfully into the depths of unconsciousness. 

Distorted, long narrow white lights slide above him. Rupturing pain had jostled him awake as the twins carried him, the voice of the doc seemed far away yet jarringly loud. _Careful! Careful! Watch the head-_

He’s heaved on a table, a hand gently cupping the back of his head and guiding it onto something soft. Before he has time to acclimate to the hard surface he’s yanked up, a strangled yell rips from his throat as he’s suddenly eye to eye with Marco, almost touching foreheads, a strong hand on the back of neck as other hands scrabble with his ripped, bloody shirt, peeling it off his arms like a second skin. 

It’s too much. The pain, the hands, the eyes. He wants nothing more than a dark place to crawl into and hide. When they lower him back down he’s faded out, there’s no strength left and when his head thumps into the folded towel, his eyes roll and flutter shut.

He fights his way back to himself, opening crusted, bloodshot eyes. The vet is snapping orders at Leonel. Looking pissed as hell, he comes over, roughly yanking Nacho by the bicep, partially rolling him onto his side so the doc can access the exit wound. The doc flushes the wound with saline, and Nacho desperately thinks of the little black hole he tried to carve out in his mind and crawl back in. 

At some point Leonel loses his grip and repositions his hold, allowing one of Nacho’s bloodied hands to rest on his shoulder, near the collar of his suit. 

When the vet starts to clean the swollen, agitated wound, digging around and picking out debris, the hand on Leonel’s shoulder squeezes with all the strength Nacho had left. He stares from around Leonel’s hip and into the dark, silently flinching and shuddering as the doc works. Above him, Leonel glowers at the vet.

_This is hell._

_This is hell._

_This is hell._

By the time the doc begins to stitch, he feels himself slipping again, and without a fight he lets himself be dragged under. 

**Author's Note:**

> Someone please tell Marco that rubbing alcohol is not recommended by the medical community as a wound disinfectant and that clean water and soap would have sufficed.


End file.
